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21

Moving Continents from Here to There

What Color Was the Bear?

It turns out the bear was white, because it was a polar bear, because the hunter lived right at the North Pole, because only at the North Pole could one carry out the geometrical journey described in the question. The crux of the matter, as shown in figure 21.1, is that we are dealing with a spherical triangle, not a plane triangle. You might want to examine this geometry on your globe of the world or your basketball.

When dealing with problems involving distances on the earth's surface, our computations are simplified if we use nautical miles, instead of statute miles or kilometers. The nautical mile is explained in the following paragraph.

We assume that the earth is a perfect ...

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